


Shadows of Kisses

by JadeLupine



Series: We Were Once Lovers [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: After-S2, Angst, Blindness, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Love, Prodigal Lover, Romance, Sadness, Set - Freeform, such hannibloom much needed.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 20:50:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1913388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadeLupine/pseuds/JadeLupine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alana sees only blackness these days, a blinding, sucking void, there is not brightness or dimness, only a staring blankness. She is in a wheelchair, her legs are useless, oh, her legs, that once ran and jumped and danced. She has no taste for blindness, for lameness, not even a thin resigned feeling, oh, she wants to see, to walk, to run. It has been three years. </p><p>“I love you, I love you.” She hears Hannibal, but she knows it is an auditory mirage, oh, the thick accent is not real, the words are not real, it is in her head. </p><p>“Leave ---“ she whispers. “Leave me alone, fiend.”</p><p>But he is there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadows of Kisses

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Gil's THE RED OF YOU series, and no, I don't know how to insert a link on mobile. 
> 
> This is very angst heavy, but it has it's happy moments - honest.

**prodigal lover.**

The night is far too still, there are no candles that burn or bloom, and even if there were, Alana could not have seen them. She sees only blackness these days, a blinding, sucking void, there is not brightness or dimness, only a staring blankness. She is in a wheelchair, her legs are useless, oh, her legs, that once ran and jumped and danced. She has no taste for blindness, for lameness, not even a thin resigned feeling, oh, she wants to see, to walk, to run.

It has been three years. 

“I love you, I love you.” She hears, but she knows it is an auditory mirage, oh, the thick accent is not real, the words are not real, it is in her head. “I love you, I love you.”

“Leave ---“ she whispers. “Leave me alone, fiend.”

“Alana,” the voice shakes, and her own hands shake in unison. She reaches out, it is all she can do, blinded and crippled, to touch another hand. Rough, she wants to taste the salt on that hand, she feels the patterns on that palm, and she knows it better than her own. She feels like reaching further to touch his face, but Alana is afraid there will be no face to touch.

“Do you remember me?” Alana hears the rhythm of Hannibal’s breathing change (of course it was Hannibal, who else would sound so sincere, so malevolent, so dangerous?), he sounded frightened, as if he were afraid she was senile.

“Yes. I remember how you left me dying.” Her voice shakes now. The sickness inside her will not go away, she is blind and crippled, oh, her blindness seeps under her eyelids and creeps on her cheeks, acid sharp, she can no longer cry, she has no more tears left, not biologically. “I remember how you walked past, and I remember how you were so callous, so cold. How you would have killed me.”

“But you are so beautiful now.” Hannibal touches her face with his fingers, with his lips, touches her crippled legs in the wheelchair. She has this terrible, glimmering yearning to see his face, to see him in his remorse, but oh, that pleasure has been denied to her. “You are beautiful, Alana.”

“I was. But look at me now, Hannibal.” She places her hands on his contorted face, she cannot see his remorse but she wants to feel it, she feels his tight lips, his gritted teeth and she drinks in the pain as if it were her life. “Look at my legs. I cannot see. I cannot walk. Look at me now, Hannibal.”

“Alana, you are beautiful.”

“Remember how I had danced with you? How we watched opera together?”

He is crying, she can hear him, and she delights a fierce delight in the fact. Well may he weep, as she could not.

“How we made love. How I loved you, how I admired you, every inch of you.” She whispers. “I can’t admire you anymore.”

His head is buried in her neck, his lips are whispering Lithuanian in her ear, and she wonders how he looks now, whether his hair is grey, whether his eyes are circled with darkness. She wants to kiss him, but what if she misses his lips, oh, she does not want to live, she does not want to live without seeing firelight, starlight, Hannibal’s light.

“Why can’t you admire me?” Hannibal’s voice comes in her ear. “Why won’t you admire me?”

_stillness-silence-gone-gone-gone_

“Because I can’t see you.”

She remembers light as a faint memory. But Alana is brave; she is strong (she doesn’t want to be). So she is determined to make as much of a glory out of this shadow stained world as she ever can.

“Go. Go away.” She tells Hannibal, who only holds her tighter. “Please, Hannibal, leave me be, leave me alone. Don’t do this. You’re only hurting me.”

“I’ll be your eyes and your legs.” He whispers, and it is so clichéd she wants to laugh, but a dry sob rips from her throat. “I’ll be all you want. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Alana.”

“No. You don’t want me, broken and torn like this.” Alana touches his lips, his cheeks “You want perfect Alana Bloom, who dances, who could see.”

“I want you.”

“You want Will. “

“I want you, Alana, I will have you, God save me, I will have you.”

“You leave me to die.” Her voice is barely contained fury. “And now you want me?”

“Alana,” his voice is muted and trembling. She has never seen him like this but well, she could not see him now, she will never be able to see him.

“Alana, please.”

_they all go into the dark_

“I am nothing to you without sight.” She wants to bend into him – fold like a fiery tissue. “I cannot see your face. How can you love something who cannot see your face.”

“Like I love you. “ He kisses her neck. “Like I will always love you.”

**describe me.**

She isn't used to being blind – even now when Hannibal leaves the house, she worries, like she used to, until her throat aches, and then she remembers she doesn't have to. Suddenly she doesn't know what to do anymore, and when he comes home, she latches onto him – she kisses him on the lips and the kiss feels like a gaping hole closing in between them.

“Tell me what you look like.” Alana whispers to him when they are naked and damp in bed. “How much you’ve changed. How much you’ve grown apart.”

“I have grey hair now – by the temples.” He brings her fingers to feel the silver and kisses her wrist. “My nose has been under the surgical knife – there is no bend any longer but there is still the scar you love to taste.”

“And your eyes.” She whispers fervently.

“My eyes are what you once saw in the mirror.”

s **illy.**

She drops a knife when he tries to teach the blind lover to cook again, and it lands dangerously close to his foot – clattering with an empty, deafening silence.

“This is so wrong.” She tries to laugh but it comes out like hollow glass. “Silly. I’m silly. _This_ is silly.”

He laughs along with her but their eyes go a long, long way in.

She was twelve, and she had liked to climb trees, she would scrape her knees and elbows, and sometimes even fall and cry till her brothers carried her home. But she had loved to scale the rough bark and poke at squirrel’s nest, eat berries and nuts that made her ache for days. She had lived her life till she was fourteen, straddling the boughs of a tree.

_o dark dark dark_

“Do you want to climb a tree again?” there is a touch of mirth in his voice, and she scoffs.

“Imagine.”

He does, and they never climb trees again.

**guilt/remorse/despair**

His head is too heavy to lift, his heart too weary to care.

“What have I done?” he whispers, again and again.

She – in the bathroom – listens to his ragged words and she weeps.

_Dark dark dark_

_She wants to explode-_

**beautiful**

He watches her sitting by the window, wind-blown, shadow-eyed; long black skirts and long black hair in long black curls, and it suits her, and it doesn’t suit her, and he’s never seen her look quite like this: he’s never seen her look quite so blind – quite so _beautiful_. Her eyes are grey and the curve of her neck is aristocratic, and she says,

“Will you braid my hair for me?”

_(Dark.)_

“Of course, my sweet.” He laughs softly through his nose. He takes up the silken curls of her hair and crosses them over the other, plaiting them expertly, elegantly like only a boy who has (or _had_ ) a sister could do. She leans into him as he ties her braids together, and kisses the end.

“All done?” She turns to him and grins, her face younger – less weary. “Do I look okay?”

“You look like an angel.” He smiles at her, and brings up her fingers to his teeth, lets her feel his white smile and his pointed teeth. “A child angel.”

“Well, that makes you somewhat of a sexual deviant, doesn’t it, Lecter-Skelter?” She rhymes his name with the fairground ride and he shivers in delight.

“You know I love you.” He has to emphasize it nowadays, he who left her bleeding and blind. “You _know_.”

“Yes.” Her smile, for once, does not fade. “Do you know?”

He knows, and he takes her hand, and they watch the wind and the beginnings of rain and the sun dipping down towards dark. Maybe we should say something, she says.

 “Maybe.” He says, but he says nothing, and rests his head on her shoulder.

**winter**

Summer is kind, but winter is icy cold with memories. Her vision worsens, she needs help to cross a room, she trips over dogs and cries like a child sometimes. He locks himself in his room for hours on end – she is blind, so she will not care, he thinks.

**poetry**

“Poems?” Hannibal laughs quietly, he does not have much respect for that medium, he loves art and tomes of fiction, not bursts of fevered sweetness. “You have written about me then, Alana? Am I the subject of your literary wanderings?”

“All of them, really.” Alana shrugged, handed him a tablet. “Obviously I couldn’t write, so I used Siri and uploaded it into my tablet. Want to take a read?”

She was a snake – devious.

“I will – but expect criticism.” He is smiling a grin she cannot see as he looks over at the tablet. “I do hope this will not be worse than the first, abysmal essay you have written for me, back when.”

“The sudden smiles and wicked laughs,” he reads,

“The way he comes and goes by halfs.”

“Was it true he had been my eyes?”

“Or were his truths simply blinding lies?”

“But he is back, and I cannot see.”

“Is it still him, or is he still free?”

“Is he still wandering, or is he close by?”

“But if it is him – why hasn’t he brought my eyes?”

The smile has dropped off his face and she knows his hands shake.

She smiles.

“The rhyming is off in the last line, isn’t it?” She grins as something breaks in him. She moves closer to Hannibal and kisses his cheek, his lips, his eyes. She finds that there is no more sadness in her blindness – it is only his sadness that is contagious to her. She kisses him till he smiles again.

“I love you.”

 

**happiness/solace**

"I remember you could  _tell_  wonderful stories." Hannibal laughs, Alana sitting on his lap, his fingers around her flat (but not for long) abdomen and his lips on her white neck.

She laughed.

"Oh, yes, splendid. But you're a better reader. Anyway, I think you’ve read to me. Not when we were dating last time, you know. But when you were my mentor. I probably bullied you into it. I was a very bossy student."   

"I remember."   He laughs, recalling the one time she refused to leave his room lest he read her Peter Pan.

She liked how his words complimented hers: quiet, putting spaces between her effervescent ramblings.   

"Read to me," she said, grinning a little, and making her eyes go wide and blue and innocent. "For old time's sake, and whatnot."

"And because you're  _making_  me," he said, eyebrows raised.   

"And because I'm making you."   

“All boys grow up, _except one_.” He starts, and she leans back against him, kiss-kiss-touch-touch-cherish.

“Do you actually have it from memory, you freaking genius?” She laughs at him, pokes him in the hard-soft-almostness of his belly. “That’s rather scary.”

“Not as scary as you were when you could not find the remote to the television set.”

“ _You_ ’re the one who even wanted to watch it.” She pouts, and kicks his shin. “I was just…helping you.”

“Oh, you don’t know how much.” He gathers Alana up, smells her hair – flowers and _her_.

"Read to me, Hannibal." She smiles. "After all, I can't ever read, right?"

His smile falters. 

Her blindness would never have colour – she is not hoping for that.

But now there are shades of grey and shadows of kisses.

 

**even stevens**

"Come, touch me - " his voice is fragmented, a sort of delirious happiness shattered by pain, but Alana knows Hannibal's voice to be in pain so often that it is natural, it does not show on his face, it is simply an undertone to his voice. "Touch my face, Alana." 

"All right, wait - don't be so anal." She touches his face, and it is wet, wet sticky wet. Has he been crying. Please don't let him have been crying. 

"What is it?" She whispers, but the wet has an odd smell - too sweet for tears. Her hands rise up to his eyes. 

"Even steven." He grins with red teeth. "You and I, we're the same now." 

She finds nothing but bandages - loose and inexpert. 

"What have you done?" 

_o dark dark dark - they all go into the dark_

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> IM SORRY I AM SORRY I AM S O R R Y


End file.
